I’m interested in looking beyond the jargon. Social impact, social enterprise, impact investing, social innovation - these are all part of a new taxonomy that looks at the crossroads of business and social impact. Buzzwords, some would say. Rethink social. What has worked, what hasn’t? Why? Is scale the answer? I cover the people concocting solutions, tinkering away till they find a viable answer. I’ve written for numerous publications, including the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times, and the Guardian. The Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting in Washington, DC has funded some of my recent reporting on global health, which appeared in the Atlantic and Guardian. I attended Georgetown University (BA) and the London School of Economics (MSc).

How to Get Your Next Business Book Published

Business book authors have a fuddy-duddy image, it seems. Older writers, more established in their careers with a Gen X view of the world, perhaps?

The Financial Times, one of the world’s most authoritative views on business, and a respected UK-based newspaper is hoping to change that. Partnered with McKinsey, they’ve started a book prize for authors under 35.

Newspapers have often run campaigns to solicit guest OpEds and articles by young aspiring journalists. But this new competition by the FT has a heftier price tag: 15,000 GBP and a flock of literary agents, inquiring about the winning proposal.

The FT started a Business Book of the Year award in 2005, in hopes of discovering new talent. But the majority of the winners turned out to be big names: Thomas Friedman, Steve Coll, Raghuram Rajan, Abhijit Banerjee. Most were over 40; several were over 50 years of age. While age doesn’t impact creativity and brilliance, the FT wasn’t tapping into the Millennial crowd. The youngest of the lot was a finalist for the award: Wharton professor Adam Grant, 32, who had become famous for his New York Times best-seller, Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success.

Anderson House (Photo credit: Financial Times photos)

The Bracken Bower Prize, an offshoot of the Business Book of the Year Award, is an attempt to change that. Andrew Hill, Management Editor at the FT, said, in an email exchange, that they’re “consciously trying to seek out the nextnext generation of business writers” with this new award. The topic for this year’s award? Growth.

Hill acknowledges that it’s rather vague. But the idea is to have young minds illuminate future trends or explain where the current ones are going. So, growth can be translated at your discretion: the sharing economy, the future of global finance, the curiosity around big data and its impact, the uber-ization of companies — all concepts that contribute to growth.

What most Millennials will not know is who the Bracken Bower Prize is named after: Brendan Bracken and Marvin Bower. Brendan Bracken was Winston Churchill’s mentor, friend, and ally. He even worked as his agent, selling Churchill’s writings to newspapers beyond Great Britain. Eventually, Churchill asked him to be Minister of Information, which he accepted with some reluctance. George Orwell worked for Bracken as a member of the BBC Indian Service. Orwell later used Bracken as inspiration for the character, Big Brother, in his famous novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The prize, however, pertains to Bracken’s efforts in establishing The Financial Times in 1945, when the Financial News, a London-paper, evolved into the modern-day FT.

While Bracken was a grander-than-life figure in British journalism and politics, Bower is regarded as the “father of modern management consulting,” by Harvard Business School. Bower took the reigns form James McKinsey to run the New York-based consulting office. When McKinsey passed away in 1939, Bower transformed the New York firm into McKinsey & Co as it’s known today.

Bower, said in 1949, words that couldn’t be more apt for a business book award today:

“So, in addition to his or her prime responsibility of managing his/her enterprise at a profit, the business leader of today is faced with new and larger responsibilities. And, at a the same time, the job of managing his or her enterprise at a profit is increasing in complexity.”

Perhaps, Millennial business writers can unravel the nuances of this complexity.

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